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Research Websites
Jeff
Chapman presents some non-genealogy websites that can help
genealogists.
In our
“Websites Worth Surfing” column, we attempt to
feature not only name-search sites but also “reference”
sites. Some of the reference sites, such as Britannica.com,
can be used as sources of background information about your
ancestors and the places and times in which they lived. Others,
like Switchboard.com, can provide alternative approaches to
root tracing when more straightforward approaches have been
exhausted. While these sites aren’t designed with genealogy
in mind, that shouldn’t stop you from taking advantage
of all the information they have to offer.
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American
Memory and the American Life Histories
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html
The Library of Congress’ American Memory historical
collection is an extremely useful resource for those who wish
to fill out their genealogy with a little family history.
The collection contains around 350,000 documents, motion pictures,
photographs, and sound recordings about people throughout
the history of the US. Using the People Pathfinder index,
one can select either a group of people (including ethnic
groupings such as African-Americans, Irish and Chinese, but
also occupational groupings such as cowboys, businessmen and
nurses) or enter an individual name to search upon. The American
Memory project is a work in progress which its organizers
say will never be complete.
The American Life Histories page, which consists of data gathered
by the US Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration
(WPA) between 1936 and 1940, is one of the American Memory
site’s most impressive components. The Life Histories
collection is the result of interviews conducted with middle-aged
and elderly citizens from across the US in the time of the
Great Depression, and features the life stories of more than
10,000 men and women from a variety of regions, occupations
and ethnic groups. Typically 2,000-15,000 words in length,
the documents consist of drafts and revisions, varying in
form from narrative to dialogue to report to case history.
The histories describe the informant's family, education,
income, occupation, political views, religion, medical history
and diet.
The informants tell stories of the world around them, as well
as the world they remember, the record stretching back well
into the 19th century. Among the stories are tales of meeting
Billy the Kid, surviving the Chicago fire of 1871, making
the pioneer journey to the Western Territories and fleeing
to America to avoid conscription into the Russian Czar's army.
Though the data presented has been converted to hypertext,
few other changes have been made to the original forms which
participants in the project filled in. It is clearly pointed
out where a word has been crossed out and a new correction
handwritten in. Staying this close to the original source
documents bestows the site a certain authenticity. Facsimile
images of the original documents are also available online,
allowing researchers to compare the transcriptions to the
originals.
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Britannica.com
www.britannica.com
The Encyclopedia Britannica has been online for quite some
time, but until quite recently it was only available on a
pay-per-use basis. Naturally, this was enough to scare most
visitors away in favor of less reliable but cheaper sources
of online information. Now, the publishers of the EB have
changed their strategy and have decided to offer the entire
encyclopedia — the oldest and largest general reference
in the English language — online free of charge, which
is excellent news for anyone interested in any sort of historic
or geographical research.
Britannica.com is one of the very few places on the web where
you’ll find properly researched, fact-checked and consistent
information. Just enter a few key words into the search engine
and the site presents you with a list of possible sources
of further information. The encyclopedia articles are presented
together with small illustrations, but are refreshingly free
of pop-up advertising, annoying animations and other useless
bells and whistles.
While the first column of the results page presents the most
relevant entries from the Encyclopedia, the next three columns
offer the user relevant web links, online magazine features
and books available for purchase through Barnes and Noble.
While the books section is probably included as a money-making
device, the reviewed web links and the online magazine articles
are often extremely helpful.
Other pleasant frills Britannica.com offers to fill your screen
include headlines from the Washington Post, the complete and
searchable Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and a rotating
selection of magazine-style feature articles. While they host
banner advertising and pitch their own products (including
the Britannica CD 2000 Deluxe at $69.95), every service the
site offers is free of charge.
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Geographic
Names Information System
GNIS
Though lacking the free online maps featured on Canada’s
Geo-Names site (see below), the GNIS contains an enormous
amount of well-organized data on American place names. The
database, developed by the US Geological Survey and the US
Board on Geographic Names, does not limit itself to important
physical features and population centers. Alongside cities,
towns, rivers and mountains are such less notable locations
as dams, ponds, bridges, cemeteries, chapels, schools, post
offices and seniors’ centers. Give the search engine
a name — any name — and it will find all places
of that name in the US. In all, approximately two million
place names are listed. Fortunately, the search can be limited
by state, by county or by type of feature. An excellent resource
for genealogists attempting to find a location mentioned anywhere
in their family histories.
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GeoNames
http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/site_e.php
This very informative and fun site is offered by Natural Resources
Canada, a government department. It offers the same features
and the same thoroughness as GNIS, but with several additional
features. After selecting a particular Canadian location,
one has additional options to enter a second place name and
get the point-to-point distance between the two locations,
get a list of places within a given radius of the selected
location, and most importantly to display a color map of the
general area of the selected location and its location on
a map of Canada. Of particular use to genealogists, the GeoNames
database also lists historic place names no longer in use.
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Deja.com
(Google Group)
www.deja.com
Deja.com, formerly Dejanews, is one of the most useful information
gathering tools on the World Wide Web. Unlike most of its
competition, Deja.com doesn’t concentrate its attention
on the web, but on Usenet newsgroups. Deja.com is a colorful
and all-but-complete web-based interface with Usenet; not
only does it allow visitors to browse through their favorite
newsgroups each day, online forms also allow visitors to post
messages directly to Usenet without ever leaving the comfort
of the web. As the name of the site implies, one of the most
attractive functions of Deja.com is its archive of newsgroup
postings. Deja.com saves copies of almost every message posted
to Usenet, with the exception of binaries and some spam (junkmail)
messages. All of these messages can be quickly searched for
keywords. Deja.com has indexed and archived most messages
posted to Usenet newsgroups since March 1995. This amounts
to more than 180 gigabytes of searchable data!
What, then, are the practical applications of this technology
for genealogists? There are several. Those with interests
in a particular name or area can search for those keywords,
providing they aren’t too common. Genealogists who stumble
upon an occupation or abbreviation they can’t understand
can search for that keyword — the odds are very good
that someone else has had the problem before and it’s
already been solved. Deja.com can also help users identify
the newsgroups in which they’re most likely to find
information of interest, so users can then either subscribe
to these newsgroups with their regular newsreader or just
browse them when they next visit the Deja.com site. And if
they don’t get a chance to check Usenet for four or
five years, no problem. Their mail will be waiting.
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Research-It
www.itools.com/
Research-It is a fantastic one-stop site for researching a
wide variety of facts and figures. From a single page, users
can search through language tools, library tools, geographical
tools, financial tools, shipping and mailing tools and Internet
tools. Strangely enough, just about every tool on the page
has a useful application for genealogists.
The language section offers the ability to seek definitions
of English words, computing terms, rhymes and pronunciations
(through the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, FOLDOC, the Rhyming
Dictionary and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary respectively),
look up synonyms in Roget’s Thesaurus or automatically
translate a word from one language to another. Other utilities
include the CMU Language Identifier, a French conjugator,
and gateways to both the Internet Anagram Server and the WWW
Anagram Server.
The library tools offered include a searchable interface to
such popular reference works as the Biographical Dictionary,
the Bible and Bartlett’s Quotations. The geographical
section allows the user to lookup US maps or telephone numbers
by city, state or zip code, but only offers non-gatewayed
links to maps for Canada and other countries. The financial
section allows the user to use Oanda’s currency converter
to determine exchange rates between different countries. The
shipping section offers a gateway to the US Postal Service’s
zip code lookup, as well as package tracking for both UPC
and Federal Express. The Internet section is probably the
least developed; it currently only offers the ability to search
listservs for e-mail discussion lists.
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Switchboard
www.switchboard.com
In its own words, Switchboard is a free nationwide residential
and business telephone directory of the US. Its “find
people” feature is ideally suited to tracing long-lost
(or short-lost) relatives. Switchboard quickly searches through
a database of over 90 million names and presents you with
all the links to e-mail accounts of registered users, as well
as the address and telephone number of all matching entries.
Of course, you may find quizzing complete strangers about
their ancestry less awkward through the mail.
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Travlang’s
Translating Dictionaries
dictionaries.travlang.com
Though this site isn’t particularly attractive or well
organized, it does possess some very useful online utilities
of interest to genealogists who have to deal with foreign-language
documents. The online Travlang dictionaries are based on easy-to-use
translating software called Ergane, which uses Esperanto to
assist it in translating from any language to any language.
Esperanto is the artificial language created by Polish physician
Ludwik L. Zamenhof in 1905 as an attempt at an universal tongue.
Ergane operates by converting any word or phrase the user
enters into Esperanto and translating this into any specified
language. The languages available for online use on Travlang’s
site include English, Old English, Latin, Dutch, French, German,
Spanish, Portugese and Afrikaans. The number of words available
in each language file varies drastically, but all contain
basic genealogical terms such as birth, death, will, mother
and father.
If you find you have a lot of translating to do and you find
you’re spending too much time at the Travlang site,
you might want to download the Ergane software for yourself.
The small freeware Windows program is available for download
from the Travlang site, as are Ergane data files for Latin,
Esperanto and most modern European languages. Ergane is a
very helpful utility to have at one’s side.
This
article originally appeared in the May/June 2000 issue of
Family Chronicle.
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